Archive for PR Case Study

If you’re a startup launching your first product, or looking for funding for a new product, you’ll want to check out Kickstarter.

My friends at MIO Global, who are making the holy grail of strapless, continuous heart rate monitor watches, used Kickstarter to generate its target $100,000 funding for product development.

Kickstarter is “the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.” On its website, independent product developers present their projects for funding pledges. In return for rewards, anyone can pledge to support a project. Rewards range from free tips to free product, depending on the amount pledged.

Backers’ credit cards are charged only if the project reaches its funding goal within the set deadline. If the targets aren’t met, backers are not charged.

Liz Dickinson, founder of MIO Global, started looking at Kickstarter when Pebble (an e-paper watch for iPhone and Android) got over $10 million in pledges on the site.

This seriously legitimized Kickstarter as a fundraising vehicle for technical projects.

The most appealing aspect of Kickstarter is that you can raise the funds you need to bring your dream to reality without having to give up personal equity.

Kickstarter is also a great way to develop a community around your product — in other words, it’s great for PR.

About Alpha, the Holy Grail of Heart Rate Monitors

Liz has worked in high technology for over 20 years, holds six patents and is the inventor of the world’s first finger sense EKG accurate heart rate watch, MIO.

MIO was revolutionary in the field of heart rate monitors. For people interested in exercising with a heart rate watch, touching the watch was better than having to wear a chest strap.

But athletes wanted more: a heart rate monitor with no chest strap, that was continuous, accurate at high speeds, and didn’t need to be touched.

Liz understood that discovering such a technology would become her company’s ultimate goal. And so, her 11-year journey in search of the “Holy Grail” of heart rate monitor watches began.

Two years ago while visiting Philips Electronics in the Netherlands, Liz saw technology that had the potential to make real her dream of finding the “Holy Grail”. Liz saw substantial promise in their approach and had a great deal of confidence in the research team at Philips. So in a leap of faith she decided to invest.

After a significant personal financial risk and lots of hard work, Liz is near to bringing the Alpha heart rate monitor to market. The business challenge before her was to find the money needed to finish the project.

Goals for the Kickstarter Campaign

Was Kickstarter the right platform for Liz to raise the money she would need to cross the finish line?

To answer this, Liz needed to determine what her capital needs were, and if Kickstarter had the power to attract that amount of money through pledges.

Liz had personally funded Alpha to the prototype stage but still needed another $100K to bring Alpha to market.

The success of the Pebble watch gave Liz comfort that Kickstarter could meet her financial goals.

At the same time, the highly public and social aspect of using Kickstarter to raise pledges allowed her to set other “soft” information goals as well. How would the market react to Alpha? Would men or women buy it? Would pledges (which are essentially correlated to price) slow down as the limited lower pledge categories sold out? Would people pledge $200 to get an Alpha?

Since Kickstarter is such a highly visible way of raising funds, there was a unique opportunity to set some PR goals.

Could Kickstarter buzz be used in a way to help build the Alpha brand and awareness in the target market (athletes) and not just the Kickstarter community?

Campaign Challenges

Don’t expect to launch the project and watch the pledges kick in

A Kickstarter project is a living, breathing thing. It needs to be watched, nurtured, updated, and tweaked regularly. You need to communicate with backers regularly.

Don’t underestimate how time and resource intensive a Kickstarter project is

If a person is uncomfortable putting her/himself out there for the whole world to see and judge, Kickstarter is likely not the right funding vehicle. You’ve got to reply to questions promptly.

Set the right reward levels that meet your goals

One of the biggest challenges is to know how to set the reward levels. If offering product as a reward, it is very important to understand all the cost components, including shipping, and the percentages taken by Amazon Payments as well as Kickstarter.

If pledge levels are too low but the funding goal is met, the sad result will be an obligation to create and deliver product at a loss. If you set low “early bird” pledge levels, they will get snapped up from the feeling of urgency.

Create design and aesthetics that entertain

It’s also very important to create a project that meets the aesthetic sensibility of the Kickstarter audience. When reviewing successful Kickstarter submissions, Liz noticed that design is essential, and the submission must be beautiful as well as informative. Many Kickstarters come to the site simply for entertainment (check out the Alpha video above).

Driving traffic and continued interest is essential

Serious thought needs to be given to driving traffic to your project. Kickstarter’s own traffic will result in a certain number of pledges. However, this may not necessarily be your target audience.

Fortunately, Kickstarter offers social sharing tools that make it easy to spread the word about a project. These include Facebook and Twitter share buttons, as well as an embed code for the project video.

Lessons Learned

Begin PR efforts well in advance of the Kickstarter launch

When talking with those who had successful campaigns, they all said the same thing: positive mention in a blog was the best way to get pledges. Before launching a Kickstarter campaign, make sure you know who the most influential bloggers are in your space and send them product to review.

The longest mentions are of those where bloggers got prototypes. First reviews should be lined up ready to coincide with the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. Succeeding blog mentions should come out throughout the life of the campaign.

The communication strategy should be totally buttoned down – who sends what to whom, when and with a clear call to action.

Remember to educate the public

Liz found that many people that came to Kickstarter as a result of her push campaign were not at all familiar with the platform or really understand what was expected of them. Part of your communication plan should include educating your market about what Kickstarter is, and how they can use it to support your project.

Keep messages crisp and consistent, use all forms of social media to their maximum

Spread word about the project and push out the message relentlessly. The Kickstarter community will generate the initial project interest in your project – but it is up to the entrepreneur to bring in the external traffic and motivate them to pledge.

It’s also important to keep communicating with people after they’ve placed their pledges. Kickstarter gives project owners a space to publish updates on the campaign and the project, complete with photos. Backers can use the Comments section, which is also a great venue for the project owner to interact with backers.

Usage of the Kickstarter supplied backer communication and statistical analyses tools is vital

It cannot be overly stressed how important it is to completely understand all aspects of the platform itself. Kickstarter provides a Dashboard to continually optimize the campaign; amount of money pledged by referring link, number of video plays and was it watched via Kickstarter or offsite, popularity of various pledge levels and ways to communicate with individual and groups of backers.

Results

Alpha was 30% funded after 3 days on Kickstarter…. and as of publication of this post, it has exceeded its $100K funding goal, just 10 days after campaign launch.

For over 20 years, we’ve been fortunate to be part of many product and company launches, with many lessons learned.

Earlier this year, we helped our client Glen Canyon Corporation earn over 30 feature articles and 150 news release postings within a span of 60 days, resulting in exceptional lead generation for them. We began pro-active outreach to media and analysts just two weeks prior to the first news release and executed the company’s formal launch at an industry trade show.

While every company is unique, our experience has shown us there are key elements essential to the success of every start-up’s PR launch: Read More→

Gone are the days when the success of PR is measured only by outputs: number of articles published about our company; number of people who were reached by the publications, TV programs and radio shows we appeared in; etc. The problem with these metrics is, we’re never really sure exactly how many people we’ve reached and, more importantly, what effect such exposure has had on consumer behavior.

Even Advertising Value Equivalency or AVE (the cost of editorial coverage if you were to pay for it as advertising space) is far from an accurate measure of exactly what results our PR efforts bring. The only thing you find out with this metric is, you probably spent way less for that exposure through PR than if you had paid for it in advertising.

Pretty impressive, but the next question is, so what?

The integration of social media with traditional media in PR has made measurement much easier. We can now trace exactly how many people clicked on a particular link and, upon getting to our landing page, how many took the action we wanted — whether it’s signing up for an email list or placing an order.

Given that there is yet no perfect way to measure the impact and effectiveness of PR, we can’t lose sight of the fact that we can at least make PR measurement more meaningful.

That is, we can measure and track those metrics that help us get to know our prospects and customers better, determine what works and what doesn’t, and have a reliable basis to make future PR, marketing and business decisions.

Our Approach to Measuring PR

In my own experience with clients at Cross Border Communication, the key is first understanding the business outcomes you need to produce. Pick that outcome apart into its underlying components.

This exercise can turn something as intangible as “building awareness” into a concrete objective with observable benchmarks, such as increase in social discussions, improvement of search engine ranking, number of downloads of a white paper, proliferation in the use of our hash tag, etc.

Therefore, metrics are meaningful because they support our PR/marketing and business goals. It becomes clear why we’re measuring something, and what the metrics mean in relation to the results or outcomes (vs outputs) we want to accomplish.

Developing some discipline around measuring the metrics that describe our benchmarks and tracking the data over time can give us powerful insights and market intelligence we can use to improve future campaigns. Company executives can also better understand and appreciate the results PR has generated.

How Do You Measure PR?

What have you been doing to measure the effectiveness and success of you company’s PR? How do you feel about the metrics you currently track?

I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below. You can also send me a message via Twitter, or post a comment on our Facebook page.

When we first started working with Dongbu HiTek in 2001, it was a start-up semiconductor manufacturer based in Korea wanting to enter the North American market. Though its parent company was worth $11 billion, Dongbu was going to enter a competitive market mostly buying from strong competitors in Taiwan and China. It was virtually unknown in the semiconductor industry and had no relationships with key media and analyst influencers in the US.

In 10 years we have provided the gamut of technology PR and marketing communications services for Dongbu – writing, media relations, trade show and event management, marketing collateral development, and much more. We have also done PR projects for them in Europe and Asia.
Although we now work with clients on online strategies, a decade ago there was no Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. No one was blogging, getting inbound links or using SEO to get found. We built relationships with Dongbu’s key influencers the old-fashioned way – one person at a time.

In an increasingly digital world, don’t underestimate the power of building long-term and personal relationships. The lessons below still apply today.

One of our newest clients, Rapid Electric Vehicles (REV) delivers completely electric fleet vehicles that serve as the first-ever mobile storage system for the electricity grid, in addition to powering on-site equipment for fleet crews.

They have a unique technology, blue-chip customers, a clearly articulated vision and an extremely quotable CEO. At first glance, it seems like they compete in a space that is crowded… until one digs deeper to find their truly compelling story.

The founder and CEO, Jay Giraud, travels and speaks extensively as a passionate advocate for clean technology in Canada and the US. In a single month, we have observed Jay:

present at the Canadian Financing Forum, be named in Vancouver’s Clean Tech “Ready to Rocket” award list

speak as a panelist at the California Vehicle to Grid Consortium

present on “Smart Grids, Smarter Cars” at the Niagara Development Forum on Innovation & New Concepts in Ontario

participate in a local tech industry reception, and

most recently, attend a micro-grid military unveiling in Oahu.

So, how does one get media excited about a company, in order to maximize a busy CEO’s activities?

From time to time, we’ll be sharing with you some PR case studies. These case studies will help to identify the key elements to a successful PR campaign. Our hope is they will help you use PR to achieve your business goals. Today’s case study is from my Director of Client Services at Cross Border Communications, Jackie Peterson.

Since jumping into the PR game a few years ago, I have learned plenty about media and delivering messages effectively. I feel fortunate to have met people running businesses from all walks of life in many different realms.

The best part of PR is meeting the entrepreneurs. They are equal parts creative, passionate and life-loving, with a dash of wild and a pinch of crazy.

In other words, we get along swimmingly.

Helping them achieve their vision is most rewarding. Probably one of the most illustrative examples of the power of PR happened in 2010, when I worked with a company looking to raise money for a private fund.

Shock, because I’ve always considered this blog to be in the fledgling stage. I started it just over a year and a half ago and while I always strive to deliver quality information about PR and social media, I haven’t exactly been diligent about it. It was only in the last few months that I’ve been able to publish a new post at least every week.

The amazing thing with doing public relations is, you never know who’s out there listening, watching or reading about you.

This might be a scary thing, but most of the time, it’s a GOOD thing.

The more consistently you put yourself out there, the more unexpected praise, recognition and opportunities come your way.

The ripple effect of PR has only gotten more intense with social networking. Journalists as well as other content publishers and influence peddlers are online. They may be “on to you” without you being aware of it.

“I wanted to share with you the great news of my first article for my book. It is a full page spread with a huge image of my book and my photo, along with a long text. It appeared in the feature section of the Litchfield County Times. Thanks so much Elena, for helping to inspire me to go after local media as a first step. I will continue to contact other newspapers and will look forward to more exposure!”

I loved the title of her book as it is what many business owners go through in their own PR efforts – Stage Fright!

We’re often afraid to get started in doing our own PR because of fear of rejection, overwhelm with how to start in the first place and general apprehension of doing something new.

In the meantime, we keep looking over at the competition who IS getting media coverage and wondering when it will be our turn to shine in the spotlight. Read More→

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Disclosure

Please assume that I have a material connection with some of the products/services mentioned on my blog. That means that I may receive a commission if you purchase through my link. While I only recommend what I truly believe in, please do you own research to decide if a purchase is best for you. Thank you!